The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Metrics Matter - People Matter More | FF02

Episode Date: January 14, 2021

Sharing how people are the critical factor behind the data reporting and situational reports for planned events, no notice incidents and projects in the private sector

Thanks again, everybody, for hitting play on this podcast, the People Process Progress podcast. Please listen to episode 65, the one right before this one with myself and Anna Liebel, all the way from Iceland, the international edition. Pretty awesome. She has great insight. She also has a great podcast at the Genius Leadership podcast, so look that up. But welcome to Foundations Friday,

number two, metrics matter, people matter more. So today I want to share some quick tips on how we capture metrics, you know, statistics for planned events, for no-no disincident response, and for projects, right? That's the world I live in. That's some things that I think a lot of you are involved in, in some aspect. So let's jump into planned events. So whether they're annual, semi-annual, just something we know about, right? We typically have the luxury of historical data being on our side. We've done this before. It's a tradition in our county, country, state, whatever. This includes the season it's usually in, the demographics of who usually attends, the

majority of folks anyway, of our attendees, and where it takes place. So we kind of know where we're playing the game, which, if in our area, responsibility is one we're familiar with. So what are a few things, if we have planned events,, festivals, etc., we should be ready to capture as metrics? Well, the number of registered attendees, bike race, fruit festival, whatever. We should know who registered for that event because usually you sign up online. Cool thing, right? So we have an idea how many people are going to show up for this. What about the weather? We know when it's going to happen. What's the weather in our area? Is it too hot? Is it too cold? Is it just right? Whatever that affects for a planned event, medical response. Do we need shade tents? Do we need extra

water? Do we need heaters, et cetera, et cetera. What's going on around this event? Are we having an event in the middle of some sort of rally or something else, right, that's going to affect it? Pretty much with any event, we need to have medical, right? How many medical calls are we having throughout the day? We should always be tracking that, that situation unit in the planning section as part of our combined incident management because that's what we're going to do, work together. What's the status of supplies, right? Do we have enough food, water, tents, et cetera, et cetera? Those are just quick things for planned events.

There's more stuff just to get folks thinking about that, that maybe if they're just getting into planning events or, you know what, thinking about stuff maybe we haven't considered. Now, let's take that from a planned event to a no-notice incident. So keeping with that incident management viewpoint, let's shift to that no notice response. So like a mass casualty incident from a traffic event, or maybe it got real hot at a planned event and people started falling out, which becomes an incident. So that's where we transition from the comfort, right, of a semi-static event to a dynamic incident where time is a critical factor, or it can be, as well as the rate we're using resources.

So what should we consider here? You know what? This is a very public safety response kind of thing for incidents or events that become incidents. How many calls have we had from medical or fire or police or health or other key responders that are helping make the situation better? What are the situation better? What are the environmental conditions? Is it near the road? Is it real, real hot? Is it real, real cold?

Are we near some folks that are super agitated? On and on and on. What are all these factors? Who is doing what where? Do we have good awareness of where our people are and what areas of this incident response? What do I need to accomplish? What critical tasks and how soon? We got to keep track of these.

And then how are we doing on those, right? There's a lot of other tactical things to consider, but these are a pretty good mental kind of thing to get our juices flowing there. Now, projects. It doesn't matter what sector you work in. Projects should be regularly monitored via some sort of data set and status to help, you know, in turn control the direction of the work and most importantly to support our people. So what type of stuff do we track for projects? Total number of tasks, right? And insert the frequency.

Do you want daily, weekly, monthly, just overall, et cetera, right? Of that total number of tasks, how many have we completed? Putting those together, what's the percent of completed tasks? Again, is it daily? Is it weekly? Is it total, right? that we want to look at how we're going to track it to be able to say how do we help folks and resources do we have too many do we have extra we can put somewhere else do we need more and on and on right so looking at

our workload looking at our people and supplies load for projects. Scope is kind of a different animal. It's hard to metric that, but that's kind of a quick look at projects. So what do all of these metrics have in common? One, they're not just numbers calculated on spreadsheets or graphs or presented in a pie chart. These data represent people, the work of people,

the stress of people, the ups and the downs, and everything else related to the stress of being staffed up on a weekend for a planned event, of seeing violence and injury for a no-notice incident, and the staff of a multi-year project to feel the pressure of virtual eyes watching their every percent change as they work early through lunch and late at night. So how do we help as leaders? We make sure that our people know we're tracking metrics for the sake of being able to spot opportunities to help our people to be able to say, what do you need? I heard once, and I don't know where I heard this from, but I liked it. Don't use data as a weapon.

This fits when we're using metrics to enable, not punish our teammates and subordinates, right? So that data is saying, Hey, I see you got a lot of work. Hey, I see we're a little behind. How can I help you make up for that? How can I get you more help? I'm a firm believer in data-driven solutions for sure, but more so in people-driven outcomes and a focus on ensuring these data are part of a process

that enables our fellow humans to make progress in wherever arena they find themselves in. Data, metrics, they're all very important, but at the end of the day, how does all of this work, all the stress, everything we're looking at affect our people? Because behind all these numbers are folks dealing with day-to-day things like all of us are of being exposed to maybe something they never have before in an incident response so we as leaders we as folks that are tracking situations we as folks that are crunching numbers need to understand that numbers that have to do with events, incidents, and projects are people. And we need to keep that at the forefront of our mind and ensure folks that we're not just

looking for these numbers to berate them or get on them, but to help them and encourage them to share with us and open up those communication channels. Good luck to you all on your daily tasks and what you do. Thank you all so much for what you do in this world. Stay safe. Please wash your hands and Godspeed.